Posted
by
pudge
on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @04:14PM
from the we-expect-nothing-less dept.

Justen writes "Terra Soft, the people behind Yellow Dog Linux (YDL), announced that they will be supporting the new Power Mac G5. Since they are an Apple Authorized Reseller, you can purchase your Power Mac G5 through Terra Soft and have YDL pre-installed on a separate partition from Mac OS X. According to Terra Soft, 'as Yellow Dog Linux was in 2000 enabled for the IBM Power3 by IBM Lab and Linuxcare, and subsequently for the Power4, the effort to support the 970-based Apple computers is anticipated to be completed with relative ease.' Life is good. Anyone wanna loan me $2,000?"

Considering it's impossible to buy one that won't ship OS X, your question makes little to no sense. This isn't going to be instead of OS X, but in addition to it. You still have the privilege of paying for the Mac OS, even if you don't plan to use it.

Personal preference? Linux can be made to be much more light weight than OS X, it is more customizable, etc, so I can understand why some people would want to use Linux, but I don't think I'd pay the extra for Mac hardware if I didn't want OS X.

I think you could still strip OS X down to the Darwin core by modifying the rc scripts... or isn't that light-weight enough?

Personally, I use Macs for the UI and hardware integration... wishing to use Linux implies some compromise in those areas. Certainly, I'd consider Linux on Mac hardware for a server... but I'd have to see the performance numbers vs. generic Lintel hardware first and weigh Linux features vs. MOSX features. A big factor would be if you are running a file-server for MOSX, something whic

I agree about the UI and hardware integration, which is why I wouldn't buy a Mac to use Linux on. Darwin and Linux aren't the same though. Some people just like Linux better, maybe because there are software packages which haven't been ported from Linux or they're Linux developers who like Apple hardware, or whatever. Apples do tend to have high quality hardware, so I can see why some people would go this route (especially for laptops) if money for hardware weren't an issue.

Pretty much all Linux apps can be compiled for all supported architectures and the pre-compiled binaries are available in several popular distributions (YDL, Debian and Gentoo spring to mind).

Besides, that's not why I, and I suspect many other folks, run Linux. It's free of restrictive licenses, you can get the source code to everything, you can reconfigure pretty much anything to work the way you want, you can become actively involved in the development of apps, drivers, the kernel, etc.

OSX is closed. Darwin is only a little bit open. You can see the source but there are a lot of licensing restrictions imposed on what you can actually do with it.

Since Linux works very well on my Mac hardware and doesn't impose the limitations of OSX it's what I prefer to run most of the time, though my system is dual boot. Best of both worlds really.

I don't see how I missed the point. And yes, all the reasons you listed are why I decided to start building my own systems using AMD CPUs and install GNU/Linux. I don't get why anyone would pay extra for Mac hardware, especially since part of that cost is an OS that I wouldn't personally use. My big question: is there anyway to build a PPC-based system without buying a Mac? Those dual-proc G5s sound pretty sweet, but only if they can run a Linux kernel.

I've heard of plenty of people to buy a phat daddy apple laptop lately, to just put linux on it...

Sure, I would never buy atm a workstation, but the laptops kick ass! Although I have found that osx/fink has more than taken care of most of my linux app needs. Add the new gentoo/fink/darwinports metaproject thing that is coming about, and OSX is going to have a ultra phat daddy toolset...

It's not released under the GPL. It's released under the Apple Public Source License [apple.com]. This is not free (as in speech), it's just open source.

You can get the code. You can modify it and use the modified code (solely for personal or internal research purposes), you automatically forfeit any rights to the modifications you make, they are automatically owned by Apple, and I have a feeling Apple can arbitrarily revoke your right to posess or use the code, including your modifications, at any time.

Actually, after reading the license at the link you posted, I'm not sure you read it. Nowhere does it say that you forfiet the rights to your modifications, or that they become the property of Apple.

The only real ristrictions I see are that modifications to APSL code must also be APSL (that's no worse than GPL), You must make your changes public, (that's the idea of "free" as in speech code), and you must allow Apple to distribute your modifications.

Pretty much all Linux apps can be compiled
for all supported architectures

I seriously doubt that.

A lot of C programs out there (both commercial
and free) contain assumptions on the size of
various types like "int" being 32 bits and
"short" being 16. Some also assume a certain
byte ordering (usually assuming little-endian).
Some assume that structures are padded in a
particular way (i.e., no padding). Some
rely on the order of evaluation on a particular
platform. Most of these are mistakes that
are qu

So if you buy an Apple but only run Linux there is an alternative. Buy a G4 PPC (non-apple) and just run YDL. Since you can run Mac OS and YDL side by side on a Apple G3 or better, why would you buy anything else?

ESR is now quite happy with the latest version of Apple's license, which was released in direct response to his complaints about it.

The open source community (as opposed to the Free-As-In-What-I-Say-Is-Free software community) complains, Apple revises, and then ESR, at least, is happy. But people like you have to go back to his INITIAL complaints in order to find something to complain about.

I like OS X. I'll be getting a G5 laptop soon after they arrive and will probably run OS X on it at last 90% of the time, with some forrays into Linux and hopefully the boys in Dresden will have a PPC-64 verion of L4 out by that time. In most ways I prefer OS X to Linux, but your arguments need improvement. You must also remember that there is non-Mac G3 and G4 hardware out there that does not have the Mac firmware necessary for OS X. This hardware is mostly for scientific computing and embedded applications.

1. PowerPC hardware, PowerPC operating system

Linux has its origins on IA32, Intel's 32-bit architecture. Every platform Linux has migrated to since then has been beset with porting problems-- Linux runs 32% more efficiently on Intel than PowerPC. This is very telling as PowerPC is in general much faster per clock than Intel. Somewhere in the translation from PowerPC to IA32 something got lost.

Mac OS is 100% native for PowerPC. The Mach kernel has been optimized for the G3, G4, and 970 since Apple began writing the operating system back in 1996. Why choose a hacked and kludged OS from another platform when you can have an environment tailor-made for the system you'll be running it on? Mac OS certainly isn't plagued by same driver problems Linux is (in)famous for.

OS X began life on m68k NeXT boxes, not PPC hardware. Linux is also 100% native on PPC hardware. The last numbers I saw showed Linux PPC outperformed OS X on the same hardware. I like some of the ideas behind Mach w/ a BSD server. Too bad they put the BSD server in the kernel address space for performance reasons. The driver gap is largely historical at this point, but still a valid but minor concern.

2. Control over the source code

In Linux, the development model is highly irrational: anyone is allowed to submit patches, and one man (Linus Torvalds) sorts through gigabyte after gigabyte of amateurish code, attempting to integrate it into the kernel. Apple's model is much more modern and decisive: the code for the low levels of Mac OS is available for anyone to download and modify, while the more complex parts of the system (QuickTime and OpenGL) are kept closed-source so those that know better-- the Apple programmers-- are the only ones allowed to tinker.

The results because of these differing development models are clear. Apple released a major update to the OS once a year, and releases about five minor updates to the OS, as well as several dozen security patches and driver updates, in the interim. Since March of 2001 we've gone from 10.0 to 10.2.5! Linux is still stuck at some sort of bizarre "in-between" 2.5 kernel patch and won't move on to 2.6 until well after Apple has released Mac OS 10.3.

It's not hard to see the difference here is a bunch of kids playing with source code instead of doing their homework vs. highly qualified professionals pushing their skills to the limits. The Mac OS user benefits.

You missed your opportunity to jab Linux in the ribs. The tender spot here is Linus switching the entire VM subsystem out in the middle of the 2.4 serries. The weakness in the development model is that it is less conservative with no PHB breathing down Linus's neck. The "bunch of punk kids writing a kernel" argument just doesn't hold water. Some of the most respected coders of our day contribute to the Linux kernel, including some very telented professionals at IBM. Sure lots of rubbish gets submitted, but it gets filtered through a heirarchy or very good coders. Linus may be a little overwhelmed, but that results in some good improvements getting dropped on the cutting room floor rather than rubbish making it into the kernel. Per man-hour, the Linux kernel development is therefore very inneficient, but you have an absolutely huge number of coders.

Your argument about not letting people see the QuickTime and OpenGL code is way off. The same effect could be gotten by opening the cod

YDL works pretty well, drivers and all on just about every G3 and G4. Driver issues haven't been an issue in my limited experience. Still i agree, OS X rocks but let 'em choose but hope they choose wisely. Any Apple sales is generally good for inovation in the PC or PPC industry.

Yellow Dog Linux has always been a great addition to the Macintosh platform. It's good to see that they are keeping up their excellent support of Apple. More choice is always good and the fact that people can buy systems directly from TerraSoft with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed is definitely a plus.

My hope is that both Apple and TerraSoft continue to work together and bring ideas back and forth between MacOS and Linux.

I thought that yesterday's veritest g5 specint report [veritest.com] was funny when it comes to describing how they configured the systems. They compared OSX vs. Redhat 9.

One pages 5-6, the describe the apple process for each of the 2 configurations. Each config is about 1/2 page or 24 lines. Besides control panel stuff, you must edit/etc/hostconfig manually, physically remove a processor and reboot twice.

The redhat config, on page 7, is only 9 lines long, requires no file editing, and has only the initial boot to sele